


Wildflowers

by Aerecurie



Series: Women Like Us [1]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Yennefer sings Tom Petty, don't worry I promise it makes sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 05:17:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12976818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerecurie/pseuds/Aerecurie
Summary: "Yennefer pulls Ciri into her arms, holding her for the first time in too many years. Her hands clutch at Ciri’s back. The girl Yennefer raised smells of fire and dust, and her eyes are ringed red with exhaustion. She’s the most beautiful thing Yennefer has ever seen."A mother/daughter reunion scene between Yennefer and Ciri.





	Wildflowers

**Author's Note:**

> The Witcher 3 contains scads of great father-daughter bonding scenes. But what about mother-daughter? We never see many interactions between Ciri and Yennefer, which is a crying shame. "Wildflowers" shows a scene that could have happened at Kaer Morhen before the crew battles the Wild Hunt.
> 
> Many thanks to Eileniessa, who beta read this for me and fixed my lore mistakes. Go read her stories! She has some fantastic Ciri/Yennefer scenes.

Ciri.

  
The word wraps itself around Yennefer’s mind as she pulls the young woman into her arms, holding her for the first time in too many years. Her nose is in Ciri’s hair. Her hands clutch at Ciri’s back. The girl Yennefer raised smells of fire and dust, and her eyes are ringed red with exhaustion. She’s the most beautiful thing Yennefer has ever seen.

  
Ciri, she thinks. Ciri. Ciri.

  
And her daughter hugs her back.

  
“I-”

  
“-missed you?” Ciri interjects. “Not nearly as much as I missed you. You have no idea-” Ciri sways in Yennefer’s arms then, and blinks, dizzy.

  
“Careful,” says Geralt. He places a hand on Yennefer’s shoulder. “Ciri’s been through a lot. She should probably rest.”

  
“No! Not yet.” Ciri’s gaze flicks from Geralt to Triss to Vesemir. “We don’t have much time, and all of you are here, and I-” She slips out of Yennefer’s arms, unsure who to embrace next. “Besides, I slept enough on that island.”

  
“That wasn’t real sleep,” says Geralt. He’s covered in grime, Yennefer realizes, and so is Ciri.

  
“You’re not planning for anything until you get food in your stomach,” says Vesemir. “We weren’t sure when you and Geralt would come back, so we don’t have much on hand, but – Lambert made a stew.”

  
Lambert claps Ciri on the shoulder. “Vesemir’s not doing it justice. It’ll be the best ploughing stew you’ve ever tasted.” He pulls her in for a hard embrace.

  
“Thank you. Really. But I’m not hungry,” says Ciri. She shakes her head, as if trying to clear away a fog. “Geralt’s right. I still feel strange.”

  
“Come, my love,” Yennefer says. She places a hand on Ciri’s cheek, which is warm and alive and real. “None of us can face the Wild Hunt on empty stomachs.”

  
As they stream into Kaer Morhen’s front hall, a frisson of energy gives Yennefer’s step a bounce it has lacked for years. The same energy animates Triss’s eyes and Geralt’s smile and Ermion’s hands, she notices. The energy is Ciri, who is alive, who is whole, who is home.

* * *

“-and then we, uh, borrowed some of Yennefer’s clothes. Also her megascope,” Eskel says, licking the last trace of stew off his spoon.

  
“You forgot that we borrowed the clothes _because_ we needed them for the megascope,” Lambert adds.

  
“Why, though?” Ciri says through a mouthful of food.

  
“Well, we…” Lambert thinks. “You know, I don’t really remember.” He jabs his spoon at Yennefer. “Hey. It was completely logical at the time. Promise.”

  
Yennefer rolls her eyes. “Regardless of whatever addled system of logic to which you’re referring, you owe me a new pair of stockings.”

  
“Guess you were hungry after all,” Triss says to Ciri. Her hand clutches the younger woman’s elbow.

  
“Guess so.” Ciri leans her head on Triss’s shoulder and yawns. “Gods, I can’t believe it. I _am_ sleepy.”

  
“Then sleep,” says Geralt, who has been watching Ciri this whole time, his brow furrowed with concern and tenderness.

  
“No. I can’t-”

  
“-go to bed in such filthy clothes? Quite right,” says Yennefer, and points at Ciri’s bowl. A spark shoots out of a fingertip, and the bowl cleans itself. “Oh, don’t give me that look. You have time for a bath. Lambert? Eskel? Fetch me hot water, if you please.”

  
Ciri groans. “I can’t waste time on a ploughing _bath_ ,” she says, but she heads for the door anyway.

  
Yennefer turns to Triss and Geralt, worry still written on her face.

  
“Go ahead,” says Triss. “Someone should examine her in case she’s injured. She’ll let you do it.”

  
“Thank you,” Yennefer says, and she means it.

  
Upstairs, steam rises from the wooden tub in the bathing chamber. Ciri clutches the lip of the tub and stares into the water as if trying to scry the future.

  
“Clothes off, please.” The young woman doesn’t answer. “Ciri-”

  
Ciri grabs her hand. “What am I supposed to say?” she says, her eyes wild. “How can I tell you everything? Everything that’s happened? And the Wild Hunt, how am I supposed to prepare you?” Her scabbed knuckles are white over Yennefer’s soft fingers. “I missed you and Geralt so much. To risk your lives now, I can’t, I can’t-”

  
“It’s all right.” Yennefer repeats those words over and over as she smoothes the tangle of Ciri’s silvery hair. “I have dealt with the Hunt before.”

  
She thinks of all the times she bathed with Ciri at the temple when Ciri was young, and the rituals bathing accompanied: supervising the girl as she brushed her hair and cleaned her teeth, and telling her stories before she fell asleep. Routine chores. The kind that seem like luxuries, these days.

  
Piece by piece, Ciri removes her clothes and shakes them out. Dirt falls to the stone floor in small showers. As she stands naked in front of Yennefer, she looks nervous and small, like a child again, but no longer the daring, sometimes imprudent child Yennefer knew. Unfamiliar scars dot her arms and legs, and trails of dried blood ooze from half-healed scabs. A thunderous wave of pain beats at Yennefer’s chest as she realizes that she can see Ciri’s lonely wanderings etched into the girl’s body. The story of her pain is carved into her bruised flesh.

  
“They’re nothing,” says Ciri. “All the bruises, I mean.”

  
“And the scars?”

 

“Will heal. Probably.” Ciri averts Yennefer’s interrogating gaze. “Don’t worry about all this. I’m here now, aren’t I? Geralt won. I won.”

  
“Not always, it seems.”

  
“No,” says Ciri. “Not always.”

  
Yennefer bites back a hundred worried questions. “Into the tub with you,” she says instead. Cleanliness is a problem she can solve right away. Scars – both physical and emotional – take more finesse.

  
Ciri yelps at the heat, then sighs in delight despite the anxiety written across her face. “The last time I had a hot bath, it was…was it Skellige?” Ciri muses. “And how long ago was that? Gods.”

  
“A long while, judging by your scent.” Yennefer hides a smiles. “It does astound me how often you and Geralt manage to smell like animal carcasses. Some things never change, I suppose.”

  
“And _you_ still smell like perfume. Even though Kaer Morhen smells like dirt.” Ciri twists her neck to look at Yennefer. “It’s a ruin now, isn’t it? Barely holding itself up?”

  
“It is.” Yennefer reaches for a rag and dips it in the bathwater. “It’s not as impenetrable as it used to be.”

  
Ciri grabs at the rag. “I’m not some swooning damsel, you know. I can wash myself.”

  
“I would never doubt it.” Yennefer evades Ciri’s grip and begins to scrub the young woman’s shoulders and neck in long, smooth strokes. “But you nearly _were_ swooning out in the courtyard. And you were right about one thing.” She wrings a stream of dirt-stained water out of the cloth. “We don’t have much time. What time we do have is for reacquainting ourselves.” _There may never be another opportunity,_ Yennefer doesn’t say. “Indulge me, if you would.”

  
Ciri cups a handful of water in front of her face and watches the rivulets wash her fingers clean. “You missed taking care of me,” she says, with a trace of that old lightness in her voice. “You and Geralt both.”

  
“I did. Terribly.” Yennefer scours at the skin behind Ciri’s ears.

  
“Ow!”

  
“Tell me, did you remember to wash behind your ears while you were on the run?”

  
Yennefer feels the muscles in Ciri’s face curve into a smile. “Of course I did.”

  
“You’re a terrible liar.” Yennefer selects a bottle of hair soap from a small collection at the foot of the tub. “Dunk your head under, please.”

  
“You won’t stop mother henning me, will you?” Ciri laughs. The sound makes Yennefer feel a happiness so intense that, for a moment, she is weightless.

  
“I am no hen.”

  
“Of course not. You’re like a…hmm.” Ciri slips under the water, and her hair fans out like some fair nebula. “Like a cormorant,” she says, surfacing. “Dark and elegant. And deadly.” She wipes a lock of wet hair out of her eyes. “You look awfully good for a hundred years old, you know. I thought you’d look older – some wrinkles, maybe, or gray hair – but you haven’t changed a bit.”

  
“Gray hair? I?” Yennefer wrinkles her nose as she works soap through Ciri’s tangled hair. “Perish the thought.”

  
Ciri leans into her touch, and for a minute they are silent. Then she says, “And has anything else changed? With the…”

  
“With the what?”

  
“I mean,” says Ciri, twisting towards her, “with you and – and children. Did you find a cure?”

  
Yennefer closes her eyes. “I will never bear children.” She bends down and presses a kiss to the damp skin of Ciri’s forehead. “You are the only child I will ever have. The only child that I want.”

  
“That’s good, isn’t it? Because you’re the only mother I care about.” Ciri smells of lilac-scented soap now. “I suppose I’m a bit lucky after all.”

  
“We are the lucky ones, Ciri.” Yennefer fills a bowl with water and pours it over the crown of Ciri’s head. “We have you back.”

  
Ciri spits soap out of her mouth. “Stop it. When did you get this sentimental?”

  
“Sentimental? Hardly. Just honest.”

  
Ciri climbs out of the tub and wraps herself in the towel Yennefer offers. “If we’re being honest, then,” she says, “then if I die-”

  
“You will not die.”

  
“-if I die, I want to be buried in the courtyard here. At Kaer Morhen.”

  
“Ciri.”

  
“I had plenty of time to think about it.” Ciri swipes at herself with the towel, then tucks it clumsily around her body. “And most of the time, I wasn’t thinking about _if_ I would die. I was thinking about _when_ I would die. I thought – I thought – that all I wanted was for my body to rest here.”

  
Yennefer extends a hand. “Let me tell you a secret.” Ciri walks towards her, slowly, then crumbles into Yennefer’s lap. As she buries her face in Yennefer’s shoulder, the sorceress realizes that Ciri is crying. “Shh,” Yennefer says, “shh.”

  
“What’s the secret?” Ciri says, her voice strained with tears.

  
Yennefer turns Ciri’s face towards hers. “Women like us never die.”

  
“What do you mean?”

  
“Do you think someone as magnificent as you or I will vanish from this earth the moment our hearts stop beating? We go on in legends. In the hearts of others. If not in flesh.”

  
“We will never die,” Ciri echoes. Her sobs are getting softer. Yennefer reaches for a hairbrush and begins to tease at the knots in her daughter’s hair. “Hey, remember how you used to make me brush my hair a hundred strokes each night?”

  
“Of course I do.”

  
“And you would sing to me, sometimes, before I went to bed. The song about the wildflowers…” She swipes at her eyes. “Do you still know it?”

  
“I haven’t sung since…” Yennefer can’t remember the last time she sung. Her voice is serviceable, not lovely, but she used to sing softly as she concentrated. “A long time ago.”

  
“Will you sing it for me?”

  
Yennefer frowns. “You’ll embarrass me.”

  
“No one else is listening.”

  
Yennefer sucks in a breath and casts about in her mind for the words to the old folk tune. The brush whispers through Ciri’s hair. The air is calm and fragrant. Outside, a gentle rain begins to fall.

  
“You belong among the wildflowers,” she sings,  
“You belong in a boat out at sea.  
Sail away, kill off the hours;  
You belong somewhere you feel free.”

  
She continues to sing, quiet and soft. Her voice is rusty with disuse, but sweet, too, and as she holds her daughter in her arms she thinks back to the years when this would have been normal, not a miracle.

  
Ciri’s breathing evens out. She is sleeping, Yennefer realizes. Yennefer dips her head and matches her own breaths to Ciri’s. If she could, Yennefer would draw Ciri’s pain and fear into her own body as if sucking a snake’s poison from a bite.

  
Before Ciri, Yennefer knew of mothers who swore they would shoulder their children’s burdens. If illness or injury struck, they would cry out that they wished they’d died in their children’s place. She thought they were a pretty myth, these mothers’ oaths. Yennefer’s own mother would not have done this for her. But then Yennefer met Ciri.

  
“You belong among the wildflowers,” she sings into Ciri’s hair, her voice thin as a thread.

  
The sound of rain on the rooftops of Kaer Morhen has stopped. Yennefer looks out the window and realizes that the rain has not stopped, just crystallized into snow.

  
In her sleep, Ciri presses herself even tighter to Yennefer.

  
The air grows colder.

**Author's Note:**

> The song Yennefer sings a bit of is "Wildflowers," by Tom Petty. Never thought I'd write a piece where Yen sings anything at all, but then I heard the cover by the Wailin' Jennys. That particular version has a gorgeous three-part harmony that makes the song so bittersweet and lovely. Do have a listen.


End file.
